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Television's history has at numerous points been punctuated by pronouncements that technological innovations will improve its programming, empower its audiences, and heal the injuries it has inflicted on American society. This enduring faith in the inevitability and imminence of television's technological salvation is the subject of this dissertation. "TV Repair"...

In an era in which women are expected to "have it all" by balancing public and private sphere responsibilities, the media increasingly define femininity in terms that are uniquely temporal. This project examines how American popular culture from the 1990s through the present represents how the mass movement of women...

This dissertation argues that the National Science Foundation's role in, and influence on, the development of large scale scientific and technological systems, most notably improvements to U.S. information infrastructure, can best be understood through an examination of the NSF's institutional history. Because of the Foundation's weakened starting position at its...

This project explores historical questions of televisual form and cultural production, centering on the proliferation of media texts that mobilize real-life misfortune as a form of entertainment in U.S. television and culture. Specifically, it examines how a variety of "reality" formats in contemporary television stage and exploit spectacles of failure,...

This dissertation explores the ways that Chinese popular media, including film, television, and magazines, reconstruct the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-76), a traumatic historical event which tremendously affected Chinese people and society. Employing a combination of methods, including visual and narrative analysis of media and cultural forms, institutional analysis of...

This dissertation analyzes the transformation of fantasy sports from a deviant, outside-the-mainstream fan culture to a billion-dollar industry that comprises almost 20 million North American participants. Fantasy sports are games in which participants adopt the simultaneous roles of owner, general manager, and coach of their own teams of real athletes...

In the age of what George W. Bush has called a global democratic revolution, the freedom to consume an ever-expanding variety of images and goods in the global marketplace is often equated with the conditions of democratic freedom. With just such rhetorical elisions in mind, this dissertation examines the discursive...

Until the late twentieth century, the American small town at the turn of the century was popularly conceived as the quintessential nostalgic object: an "ideal" moment of lost "innocence," albeit one never existing in reality. This conception is belied, however, by my study of its representation in film and television...

"Black Power TV: A Cultural History of Black Public Affairs Television, 1968-1980" chronicles the history of a television genre that emerged in 1968, addressing African American audiences with such bold titles as Like It Is, Say Brother, Our People, and For Blacks Only in cities such as Boston, New York,...

How do independent artists use social media and e-commerce websites to support their creative businesses? This dissertation examines independent artists’ participation in the peer economy for selling handmade goods, a hybrid economy that combines sharing content on social media and selling goods on e-commerce platforms. While a multidisciplinary array of...